Hague Congress

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The Hague Congress was the Fifth congress of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) held in (September 1872) in The Hague, Holland.

It marked the end of this organization as a unitarian alliance of all socialist factions (Anarchists and Marxists).

The Marxist faction took control and the anarchist faction founded a new International, dubbed the Jura federation, in the subsequent Congress of Saint-Imier, a few days later, from which also emerged the Anarchist St. Imier International.

The Hague Congress is famous for the expulsion of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin for clashing with Marx and his followers over the role of politics in the IWA.

Later in that year of 1872 Bakunin wrote:

Is it not astonishing that Mr. Marx has believed it possible to graft onto this precise declaration, which he himself probably wrote, his scientific socialism? For this – the organization and the rule of the new society by socialist savants – is the worst of all despotic governments!

^[1]

Marx in Amsterdam

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, leaders of the Marxist faction, went to Amsterdam after the congress and had a speech there. There were only a few hundred socialists in the Netherlands. A hundred of them listened to the speech of Marx, but they were not interested. All hundred went upstairs with anarchists who entered the room with a few hundred supporters. Marx and Engels were left alone in the room with nobody left to listen to their speeches, so they left. Hendrik Gerhard, leader of the socialists in Amsterdam visited Marx in his hotel. Later, he angrily told the other socialists that Marx treated him like a gentleman treats his porter. Gerhard said he couldn't understand why Marx needed the 800 pages of the first book of Das Kapital to prove that the surplus of the work of a worker goes to the privileged classes, when it could be said in one sentence. It took until 1894 before the Marxists got their own organization in the Netherlands.

Notes

1. ^

   "On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" by Mikhail Bakunin, 1872

Sources

1. "On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" by Mikhail Bakunin, 1872 available online at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/karl-marx.htm

See also

• History of anarchism

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